The Korea Herald

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: global military threat

Jun 14, 2018

I wrote a column recently about how a longstanding assumption of America’s China policy -- that economic integration between the two countries is an unalloyed good -- has now been overtaken by events. But this isn’t the only area in which China’s rise is forcing a re-evaluation of old beliefs.Now, I’ll delve into another issue with enormous implications for US-China relations and American interests: the rise of China as a more globally oriented military power.For years, most experts believed tha
[Leonid Bershidsky] World Cup extravagance shows Russia hasn’t mastered cost control

Jun 14, 2018

If the record cost of the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 was the embodiment of Russian government wastefulness, the soccer World Cup, which starts on Thursday, appears far more restrained. Yet, despite its best efforts to bring expenses under control, President Vladimir Putin’s regime still hasn’t learned how to be parsimonious.　 The most-often quoted cost assessment for the Sochi Olympics is $51 billion, $11 billion more than the second most expensive Olympics, the 2008 Beijing summer games. The
[Mark Buchanan] Why de-nuking North Korea is so difficult

Jun 14, 2018

President Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true, but following his historic meeting Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his repeated assertion during a press conference that “it does take a long time” to “pull off complete denuclearization” stacks up pretty well. It will probably take a decade at the very least.　 It’s not hard for a nation to dismantle or destroy its nuclear weapons, as well as the technological infrastructure used to create them. North Korea may have as many
[Eli Lake] Once Trump saw Kim as a tyrant. Now he treats him like a statesman.

Jun 14, 2018

There was a time, only half a year ago, when President Donald Trump seemed clear eyed about North Korea. He invited a survivor of one of its gulags who had walked thousands of miles to freedom to be an honored guest at this year’s State of the Union. Behind the petty insults he once hurled at Kim Jong-un, Trump also spoke eloquently about the Kim regime’s true, horrific nature.　Well, it turns out all of that talk of Koreans yearning for freedom was prattle. Trump is in deal-making mode. So he la
[Michael Schuman] This time is different with North Korea. But better?

Jun 13, 2018

I should have been excited as I watched a historic event unfold in Singapore. The summit meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un held out hope that the last ugly conflict of the Cold War could be brought to a close, alleviating the threat of nuclear war in Asia and possibly opening up the vicious North Korean dictatorship to the world.For me, the matter is more personal. I lived in South Korea for several years in the 1990s, and I’m forever connected to the peninsula by bonds of family and frien
[Leonid Bershidsky] Trump’s approach to Kim is amoral. Also, it may work

Jun 13, 2018

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un didn’t agree on anything of global importance, and the grandiose photo opportunity that took place in Singapore probably benefited Kim more than it did Trump. But the beauty of the moment is that Trump doesn’t care about that sort of thing, and that could be good for world peace.Consistency isn’t generally one of Trump’s strengths. Even at his Singapore press conference on Tuesday, he first said North Koreans’ human rights had been di
[Kristalina Georgieva and Marie-Claude Bibeau] Gender inequality has high price

Jun 13, 2018

There is no doubt that ensuring that women and girls enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men and boys is the right thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint. But it also makes economic sense -- $160 trillion worth, to be precise.A new report released by the World Bank Group, with support from the Canadian government, finds that if women had the same lifetime earnings as men, global wealth would increase by $23,620 per person, on average, in the 141 countries studied, for a total of
[Chichago Tribue] When Trump met Kim

Jun 13, 2018

Meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a feel-good document that outlines lofty ambition but no specifics. It could -- emphasis on could -- eventually lead to substantive negotiations. It could -- emphasis on could -- eliminate the threat of nuclear attack against the US by North Korea.Or it could lead to nothing but the next round of trouble.That’s because Kim’s words alone, his signature on a piece of paper, are worth nothing. Just as
[David Ignatius] In deal with Trump, Kim gave up very little

Jun 13, 2018

Credit President Trump for seizing the diplomatic moment at the Singapore summit. But the person who most shaped this extraordinary encounter was North Korean leader Kim Jong-un -- who is indeed, as Trump said Tuesday, a “very talented” young man who has achieved something that “1 out of 10,000 probably couldn’t do.” It’s almost a magic trick, what Kim has accomplished: He has obtained Trump as a partner in rebranding his poor, brutally autocratic country as a modern condo-resort investment proj
[Adam Minter] China’s spies elude US vacuum cleaner

Jun 12, 2018

President Donald Trump could never be accused of underestimating the impact of Chinese economic espionage and technology transfer on the United States. “We’re talking about big damages,” he said when discussing retaliation for intellectual property theft in a January interview. “We’re talking about numbers that you haven’t even thought about.”His tariffs and a recently floated proposal to restrict certain Chinese researchers in the US are calibrated to be equally tough. But will they work?To ans
[Kim Seong-kon] “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Korea

Jun 12, 2018

Korea is radically different from Latin America in many respects. Unlike Latin America, for example, Korea was never directly colonized or exploited by Western countries. Unlike Latin America, Christianity, too, has never played a role in the advent of Western imperialism in the case of Korea. On the contrary, Western missionaries benevolently contributed to the modernization of Korea by building schools, hospitals and orphanages in the early and mid-20th century. Therefore, it was sheer nonsens
[Therese Raphael] Brexit a la Trump is a hard-liner’s fever dream

Jun 12, 2018

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson reportedly once said that he enjoyed trying to change the course of history, even if that meant “throwing rocks into glass houses and listening to the shattering of glass.” So it’s no wonder he thinks that US President Donald Trump would be a great Brexit leader.“Imagine Trump doing Brexit,” Britain’s chief diplomat told a room of 20 Conservative Party guests at a private dinner Wednesday night, in an off-the-record talk leaked to Buzzfeed. “He’d go in bloody h
[Brendan Kelly] China’s richer than it thinks

Jun 12, 2018

Almost any foreign official, businessman or journalist visiting Beijing has heard the mantra that China can’t be expected to open up its markets or meet more stringent international standards because it’s still a developing economy. Maybe that argument was valid 20 years ago. Now it’s increasingly tenuous. More importantly, it’s damaging to China and the world.Pleading poverty ignores the tremendous economic progress China has made in the last few decades. When China joined the World Trade Organ
[Lee Jae-min] Jeju a testing ground for refugee policy

Jun 12, 2018

Jeju Island has become a hot potato inside the Korean government. On the same day the Ministry of Justice listed Yemen as a state whose nationals are not permitted to enter the sub-tropical island without a visa, the National Human Rights Commission issued a strong statement urging agencies in charge to take more active measures to protect the basic rights of the refugees from Yemen staying on the island. Both happened on June 1.It all started with a recent surge of Yemeni refugees entering the
[Letter to the Editor] Request to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un from a common citizen

Jun 12, 2018

Sir, the eyes of the world are on you this week.Please be gracious enough to do away with your nuclear weapons and let the world breathe in peace. You have made your point, that even a small country can stand up to the super powers and hold its own. Now, it’s time to bury the hatchets of the past and move to a new future. It is time for you to focus on the welfare of your own citizens. Let them have the best foods, housing, education, music, movies, books and technology. Let them live wonderful